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According to Northrop Frye (Fables of Identity: Studies in
PoeticMythology (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1963),
metahistory is a synonym for the philosophy of history, or, at a
less exalted but no less powerful level, of a system of
anthropological or philosophical principles which underpin the
knowledge of any historical account and are tacitly or explicitly
believed by the historian to run throughout human experience,
making it possible to ground an historical account in principles
which are themselves not subject to the one great law of history –
that everything is mutable. A famous example of a metahistorical
position is found in Marx's dictum “all history is the history
…

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